Approximately a decade ago, a statewide survey of the
California Historical Society revealed that a Scotsman, who
died in 1914, was the thought to be the greatest figure in
California history! That man was John Muir.

Who was this Scotsman, John Muir? Why was he in
California? And what did he do to earn such depth of
admiration, an admiration that continues today -- four
generations after his death?

It is with a great deal of pride and pleasure that I have
responded to the kind invitation to appear before you this
evening -- to share with all of you my knowledge and love for
your countryman, John Muir.

I hope before this evening is through to answer for you
the questions I have just posed. I hope to describe for you the
immense stature of this man in my country. I hope to convey
to you the magnitude of the impact that the ideas and the
philosophy of this man had, not only upon the American
landscape as the father of the United States National Park
System, but upon the environmental movement throughout the
world.

I have come to Scotland from across the Atlantic, from
the small city of Rochester,in the State of Minnesota in the
North Central United States, to appear before you this evening.
And I come as the 39th direct successor to John Muir as
President of the Sierra Club, an environmental organization he
founded one hundred years ago this year in San Francisco; an
organization today composed of more than 600,000 members
located in the United States, Canada, and other countries
throughout Europe and the rest of the world; an organization
reputed to be perhaps the most influential environmental
organization in history; an organization that still shares with
John Muir his love for, devotion toward, and desire to preserve
the wild and beautiful places that God placed upon our planet.

On Thursday morning, April 21, 1988, I stood on a
makeshift platform in front of a small unpretentious 3-story
building on the main street of a small fishing village, on the
eastern coast of Scotland -- Dunbar. That day in Dunbar was
rather raw and threatened rain. Two flags were hanging off
the front of that building at 128 High Street -- the blue and
white flag of Scotland, of course. The second flag was my
country's own stars and stripes.

In spite of the uncertain weather, the streets were filled
with excited and curious townspeople, as well as journalists
and honored guests from all over the United Kingdom. Kilted
pipers were playing spirited aires. Local school children were
clearly enjoying this unusual holiday from their classes; the
boys and girls were dressed in costumes from early in the
prior century.

All had assembled to honor John Muir, a native born son
of Dunbar, Scotland, who as a lad of only eleven left that
village and journeyed with his family to a new land where they
settled on a small Wisconsin farm -- not very far east of
where my wife and I currently live.

The occasion for gathering in Dunbar was the 150th
anniversary of the birth of John Muir in that little village. The
crowd had gathered in front of Muir's birthplace to listen to
me, an American, tell them why this boy was someone very
special, someone who became world famous.

I had come to Scotland at the invitation of the trustees
of a newly formed conservation organization here in the UK,
The John Muir Trust. The John Muir Trust comprises almost
two thousand men and women from across this kingdom,
individuals who seek to rekindle in this country the spirit and
memory of John Muir, and, in the spirit and memory of John
Muir, to restore and preserve some of the wild places in this
land for all future generations to come.

We at the Sierra Club are very gratified by the
establishment of the John Muir Trust to help teach John Muir's
principles and to preserve wild places in his beloved homeland.
The actions of the members of the John Muir Trust honor John
Muir and the principles for which the Sierra Club stands.
These members have truly, to use Muir's own words, done
"something for wildness and made the mountains glad by their
efforts."

The Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, continues to serve
actively and ably as the Royal Patron of the John Muir Trust.
And I am honored to have been elected a Trustee of the
organization, and always look forward to my meetings here in
the United Kingdom with those dedicated and committed
individuals.

When I first arrived in Scotland in 1988, I was surprised
to learn that John Muir's achievements are virtually unknown
here in his own land. And it was my privilege to describe for
the people of Dunbar, and the gathered representatives of the
UK press, radio and television, the strange path that took your
native son across the Atlantic to my country, where he
became, perhaps, the most influential environmentalist the
world has ever known.

John Muir -- farmer, inventor, industrialist, sheepherder,
naturalist, explorer, writer and world-renowned
conservationist -- was born on April 21st, in the year 1838, in
Dunbar, Scotland. He attended local schools, climbed the
crumbling ruins of the Dunbar castle, and roamed across the
Lammermoors for the first eleven years of his life. His father,
Daniel, a local grain merchant and religious zealot, seemed to
have no success in taming the young boy's wild and adventurous
spirit, even with the frequent thrashings that he administered,
according to John's descriptions -- thrashings that apparently
were to try to remove the devil from the boy and instill in him
a fear of and a respect for God. By age ten, John had
memorized the entire New Testament and much of the Old
Testament "by heart and sore flesh" as he described it. He
later asserted that at that time "Scotland's whole educational
system was founded on leather."

However, at that point in his life, John's continued
excitement for the adventures of life was truly heightened. By
1849, word of amazing gold discoveries in the streams of
California was filtering back to Dunbar, and other sea ports
around the world. His father, dreaming of the not-uncommon
dream of some greater opportunity somewhere else, boarded
the family onto a schooner bound for the United States. He
moved them, primarily by ship through Lakes Erie, Huron, and
Michigan, half way across the North American continent to the
north shore of a small lake 10 miles north of Portage, a small
town in central Wisconsin.

John Muir later acknowledged that it was on that farm
site at Fountain Lake that he first conceived of the idea of
wild lands set aside by governments for their scenic and
educational value alone, not just for their potential
commercial resource value. This idea was the foundation of a
National Park System -- not only in my country, but for all the
world. But this gets us ahead of the story that I wish to share
with you tonight.

Muir's father was a harsh disciplinarian and worked his
family from dawn to dusk. Whenever they were allowed a
short period away from the plow and hoe, Muir and his younger
brother, David, would roam the fields and woods of the rich
Wisconsin countryside, a countryside not terribly unlike the
hills and valleys of the East Lothian region. John became more
and more the loving observer of the natural world.

His father's insistence that the family immediately go to
bed at the conclusion of the evening prayers held in the little
farmhouse at dusk led John to discover that if he arose in the
early hours of the morning between 3 and 4:00 a.m., he could
have several hours of quiet in the cellar beneath the house
where he could read books by candlelight, books lent him by
sympathetic neighbors, books read in peace and without fear of
angry interruption by his father.

It was at this location that Muir, a boy of perhaps
seventeen, almost died under strange circumstances. He
succumbed to the effects of carbonic acid gas, called "choke
damp" by deep rock miners, while chipping away fine-grained
sandstone at the bottom of an 80-foot deep well that his
father insisted be dug on the family farm. Dragged out of the
well to safety, barely able to breathe, John was allowed only
two days to recover, and then his father, true to his nature,
directed him once more to the bottom of the well to complete
the painstaking digging.

In his early morning freedom, John also became an
inventor, a carver of curious, but practical, mechanisms in
wood. He made intricate devices, such as a large thermometer
which used a three-foot iron rod from a broken wagon as the
temperature sensitive element, whose minute expansions and
contractions were magnified 3,200 times by a series of hoop
steel levers. The instrument was so sensitive its pointer
could register the body heat resulting from standing near it,
and its three-foot dial was visible to the boys as they worked
the fields below their farmhouse. He turned his attention to
devising clocks using the principle of the pendulum which he
learned from a book. These clocks not only kept accurate time,
but were engineered to useful tasks, such as lighting fires or
feeding livestock at a preset time. He designed a combined
desk and clock nine feet tall that removed the scholar's books
from a shelf and opened them for study for a prescribed period.

He created a wondrous contraption which attached to his
bed -- a device that could automatically raise the bed upright
and tip him out of bed into the predawn darkness, the only time
his father permitted him to read undisturbed. Several of Muir's
devices, and the intricate plans for several more can still be
found at the Wisconsin Historical Museum in Madison,
Wisconsin.

In 1860, at age 22, he left home for good. Against his
father's wishes, and with the encouragement of his neighbors,
he took his inventions to the state agricultural fair at Madison,
where he won not only admiration and prizes, but also an
invitation to enter the University of Wisconsin. Enrolled there,
he followed no particular course of study, taking classes based
only upon his interests, achieving, nevertheless, excellent
grades. His dormitory room was reputed to be filled with
plants, and to have looked more like a laboratory than a
dwelling place.

After four years, he left Madison during the midst of the
American Civil War to travel north to Canada, odd-jobbing his
way through that yet unspoiled land. In truth, John Muir was
avoiding being drafted into the War between the States of the
early 60s. Muir was a pacifist who could not abide the carnage
of that war among the Americans from the north and the
south.

For several years, he explored the woods and bogs of
southern Ontario, while earning substantial sums of money as
an industrial engineer. For example, at one tool factory he
contracted with the owner to devise a lathe-type machine
which could mass produce handles for brooms and rakes. Muir's
new machine was so successful it could produce what was
formerly a year's production of handles in only one week.

In 1867, the war over, Muir returned to the United States.
While working at a factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, Muir
suffered a blinding eye injury that would change the course of
his life. While Muir was attempting to loosen a leather belt,
being used as a power drive, with a common file, it slipped and
the tang pierced his right eye, robbing him of the sight from
that eye. As apparently not uncommonly happens, the nerves of
the left eye in traumatic sympathy also ceased to function.
The lover of the great outdoors lay for weeks in a dark hospital
room, blind and helpless. When he had the miraculous good
fortune to regain most of the sight in both eyes, he made that
decision that so few of us have the courage to make -- a
decision to do that which makes us most happy regardless of
its potential for financial rewards.

Muir assessed his life. His love for plants and the earth's
wild places, outweighed his need for money which he found
could easily be derived from machines. At that point then
began his years of wanderlust. He set out on the journey of a
thousand miles, through the lawless perils to be found during
the postwar reconstruction era in the southern United States.
Muir found a bit of peace of mind and safety by sleeping
primarily in cemeteries, where he was confident bandits would
not be willing to frequent at night. He traveled from
Indianapolis to Florida and then across swamps of Florida to
the Gulf of Mexico, contracting malaria in the process. Once on
the Gulf, he sailed to Cuba, and from there to Panama, where he
crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast of the United
States, landing in post-gold rush San Francisco in March of
1868. From that moment on, though he would thereafter travel
around the world, California would be his home.

It was California's Sierra Nevada and, in particular, the
Yosemite Valley that truly claimed him. In 1868, he walked
across the San Joaquin Valley of central California through
waist-high wildflowers and into the high country for the first
time. Later he would write:

"Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the
Nevada, or 'Snowy Range,' but the Range of Light . . . the most
divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever
seen."

He herded sheep through that first summer and made his
home in the Yosemite Valley.

By 1871, he had found living glaciers in the Sierra and
had conceived his controversial theory that it was glaciation
that had produced Yosemite Valley, not a cataclysmic
earthquake, as was commonly thought at that time. He began
to be known throughout the country for his scientific writings.
Famous men of the time -- Joseph LeConte, Asa Gray, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson -- made their way to the door of his pine cabin.

Beginning in 1874, a series of magazine articles by Muir,
entitled "Studies in the Sierra," really launched his successful
career as a writer known to the national public. He left the
mountains and lived for awhile in Oakland, California. From
there he took many trips, including his first to Alaska in 1879,
where he was the first white man to discover the area now
known as "Glacier Bay." Glacier Bay is now one of the units of
the United States National Park system, and features John Muir
Glacier among its many wonders.

In 1880, Muir married Louie (short for "Louisiana") Wanda
Strentzel and moved to Martinez, California, just north and
east of San Francisco, where together they raised their two
daughters, Wanda and Helen. Settling down to some measure of
domestic life, Muir went into partnership with his father-in-
law and managed the family fruit ranch with great success. He
organized the local growers, and this canny Scotsman became
the bane of the San-Francisco Bay area fruit merchants with
his insistence on higher prices for him and his neighbors.

However, although ten years of active fruit ranching
produced resources that made him financially independent for
the rest of his life, those ten years did not quell Muir's
wanderlust. His wife, sensing his continued unrest, urged him
to once again resume his travels. She wrote to him in a
wistful, selfless letter:

"A ranch that needs and takes the sacrifice of a noble
life, or work, ought to be flung away beyond all reach and
power for harm . . . The Alaska book and the Yosemite books,
dear John, must be written, and you must be your own self,
well and strong; there is nothing that has a right to be
considered beside this except the welfare of our children."

Those travels took him to Alaska many more times, to
Australia, South America, Africa, Europe, and, of course, again
and again to his beloved Sierra Nevada. "I have not yet in all
my wanderings found a single person so free as myself," he
confided to a friend.

In July of 1893, he returned to Dunbar, staying at his
boyhood home, directly adjacent to his birthplace, which by
that time had become the "Lorne Temperance Hotel." He looked
up relatives and playmates, including the woman who had been
the only child who could outrun him. He went from Dunbar to
northern Scotland to wander over the hills and vales of
blooming heather. He traveled on to the bogs of Ireland, the
glacier carved fjords of Norway, the glaciers of Switzerland,
back to London to the country estate of Joseph Hooker, the
botanist; and then back once more to Dunbar for a last visit.

In his later years, he turned more seriously to writing,
filling 60 volumes of journals, and publishing more than 300
articles and 10 major books, all recounting his travels,
expounding his naturalist philosophy, and beckoning everyone
to "climb the mountains and get their good tidings."

Muir's passionate love of the high country gave his
writings a spiritual quality. His readers, whether presidents,
members of Congress, scientists, or the general public, were
inspired and often moved to action by the enthusiasm of Muir's
own unbounded love of nature. Let me share with you some of
Muir's philosophy that makes him such a special and influential
figure, even in today's world.

In his book "Yosemite," Muir stated, "Everybody needs
beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where
Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul
alike."

John Muir was a man with a unique vision of Man's place
in nature. In an early journal, he gave his address as "Earth,
Planet, Universe." While he was writing in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, his was an often lonely voice for
preservation of our natural environment. He saw nature not
just as a storehouse of raw materials for man's economic
needs, but as a spiritual resource as well.

Muir urged people to find beauty in the forest and
mountains, the wild places of the earth. He said:

"Keep close to nature's heart . . . and break clear away
once in a while, climb a mountain or spend a week in the
woods. Wash your spirit clean. . . . Go to the mountains and get
their glad tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as
sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own
freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares
will drop off like autumn leaves."

John Muir had what we today recognize as a holistic view
of ecology, which saw man as part of the natural world, not
the center of it. He noted in one of his best known quotations
that "whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the universe." This was a
remarkable insight for a man born more than 150 years ago, a
man who lived when industrialism was just getting into full
swing.

He recognized that all living things are part of a whole,
and if we lose any part of that whole we lose a part of
ourselves. Yet, he also could observe, "There is not a fragment
in all of nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a
full harmonious unit in itself." For Muir this was not a matter
of merely conservation of natural resources, but a matter of
human physical and psychic survival. He advocated
preservation of wild places for reasons of mental health:

"Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no
repose like that of the deep green woods. . . . Sleep in forget-
fulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals,
there is no upness comparable to the mountains." He also wrote,
"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

These views were landmarks in the history of
environmental conservation.

Through a series of articles appearing in Century
magazine, Muir drew attention to the devastation of mountain
meadows and forests by sheep and cattle. With the help of
Century's associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir
worked to remedy this destruction. In 1890, due in large part
to the efforts of Muir and Johnson, an act of Congress created
Yosemite National Park, the crown gem of the United States
National Park System.

Johnson and others suggested to Muir that an association
be formed to protect the newly created Yosemite National Park
from the assaults of stockmen and others who would seek to
diminish its boundaries. On May 22, 1892, one century ago this
year, John Muir helped found the Sierra Club in the State of
California at a meeting in San Francisco. He commented in his
invitational letter that he hoped that this Club would be able
to "do something for wildness and make the mountains glad."
Muir served as the Club's first and only president until his
death in 1914.

Incidentally, the international headquarters of the Sierra
Club remain in San Francisco. We purchased our own building
there within the past ten years. The Sierra Club now has 58
Chapters and some 350 Groups in the United States and Canada.
We have grown, unfortunately thanks in part to the Reagan and
Bush administrations' indifferent, and indeed destructive
attitude toward our environment, to more than 600,000
members internationally, with an annual budget of about 40
million dollars. We have more than 300 employees, not only in
San Francisco, but around the country in our Washington, D.C.
lobbying headquarters and 15 regional offices. We have one of
the largest congressional lobbying (what you refer to as
"campaigning") operations in our country. We have a tax-
exempt foundation (what you refer to as a "Trust"), The Sierra
Club Foundation, that funds our many educational efforts. We
have a sister organization, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Club
with attorneys located in offices in six locations around the
country. We have a publishing house, Sierra Club Books that
publishes 22-25 adult titles each year and another 5-7
juvenile books. They publish six different Sierra Club
calendars each year. The Sierra Club has had at least two of
the top 10 best-selling calendars each year for the past
decade. We get well more than 60,000 photographs submitted
to us each year for our publications. A consulting firm has to
be hired to screen these down to 2,500 for our own inspection.
The color separations for the calendars are done in Italy and
the calendars themselves are published in Japan, in order to
attain the highest quality.

You will find on American newsstands "Sierra," the Club's
award winning magazine, which is filled with inspirational
photographs, drawings, and articles. We run an international
outings program, sending thousands of members and
nonmembers on hundreds of outings across our nation,
throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, and around the world. One
of the popular Sierra Club outings the past two years has been
a tour of Scotland from Muir's home in Dunbar to the John Muir
Trust properties on the Knoydart peninsula in the West
Highlands and on the Isle of Skye.

However, the topic tonight is not the Sierra Club, but its
founder, your countryman, John Muir. Muir wrote:

"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away, and if
they could, they would still be destroyed -- chased and hunted
down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark
hides, branch horns, or magnificent bole backbones. . . . Through
all the wonderful eventful centuries since Christ's time -- and
long before that -- God has cared for these trees, saved them
from drought, disease and a thousand storms . . . but he
cannot save them from sawmills and fools -- only a concerned
public can do that."

This quotation from "American Forests" led United States
President Grover Cleveland to establish 13 forest reserves,
totaling more than 21 million acres and the creation of what
was to become the United States Forest Service.

Muir was on personal terms with five presidents and
many writers and philosophers of the time. He was able to
help persuade President Benjamin Harrison to set aside 13
million acres of forest, and President Grover Cleveland to set
aside another 21 million acres. But it was with President
Theodore Roosevelt that Muir exerted his greatest influence.
In 1901, Muir published "Our National Parks," the book that
brought him to the attention of Roosevelt. In 1903, Roosevelt
toured the American West, and requested the opportunity to
camp with Muir in Yosemite Park. There, together, beneath the
trees, they laid the foundation of Teddy Roosevelt's innovative
and notable conservation programs. After that meeting with
Muir, Roosevelt embarked on a course of action that
established 148 million acres of National Forest, 5 National
Parks and 23 National Monuments during his term of office.

Besides his efforts to establish Yosemite Park, Muir was
also personally involved in the preservation of lands that
resulted in the creation of Sequoia (1890), Mount Rainier
(1897), Petrified Forest (1906), and Grand Canyon National
Parks (1919), as well. Muir deservedly is often called the
"Father of the National Park System." It is most important to
note that this applied not only to our country, but to the rest
of the world as well. Prior to his time, no other government
had adopted the concept of formally setting aside public
lands, preserved in perpetuity in their wild state, for scenic
and educational purposes, as opposed to being saved for their
commercial resources.

If you define a great man as one who helps change the
direction of his country toward more socially desirable goals,
then John Muir was a very great man. When Muir began his
conservation career in the late 1880's, America seemed
committed to a totally devastating attack on the environment.
When Muir died in 1914, the country was committed in spirit,
if not always in fact, to the wiser use of its natural resources.
Put simply that is his greatness. Muir did not invent
conservation any more than Henry Ford invented the
automobile, but as Ford popularized a radically new concept in
transportation, Muir popularized a radically new concept in
land use--the concept of wilderness preservation.

The works and deeds of John Muir led not only to the
creation of National Parks, National Monuments and great
forest reserves in this county in his lifetime, but they have
been a continuing inspiration to people who are today striving
to protect the natural environment from threats that Muir
could not have predicted--toxic wastes, acid rain, ozone
depletion, groundwater contamination, mass destruction of
tropical rain forests, extinction of whole species, and many
more.

Teaching us that nature is not just a commodity, but an
integrated whole, Muir showed us that it is the flow of life
itself which must be preserved if humanity is to continue to
thrive on this planet. This insight was of the Earth as a
divinely appointed home of natural beauty, if we could only
keep it that way:

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great
dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying
through space with other stars all singing and shining together
as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of
beauty."

The lessons that John Muir taught in his day are just as
valuable to us and to the world today.

One of our historians, William Frederic Bade has written
the following about John Muir:

"To few men was it given to realize so completely the
elements of eternity--of time effacing enjoyment in work--as
it was to John Muir. The secret of it all was in his soul, the
soul of a child, of a poet, and of a strong man, all blended into
one. . . . An innate nobility of character, an unstudied reverence
for all that is sublime in nature or in life, unconsciously called
forth the best in his friends and acquaintances. In the
spiritual as in the physical realm flowers blossomed in his
footsteps wherever he went. After all it is to such men as
John Muir that we must look for the sustenance of those finer
feelings that keep men in touch with the spiritual meaning and
beauty of the universe, and make them capable of
understanding those rare souls whose insight has invested life
with imperishable hope and charm. . . . To all who knew John
Muir intimately his gentleness and humaneness toward all
creatures that shared the whole world with him, was one of
the finest attributes of his character. He was ever looking
forward to the time when our wild fellow creatures would be
granted their indisputable right to a place in the sun."

Muir and the Sierra Club fought many battles to protect
Yosemite Park and the Sierra Nevada, the most dramatic being
the campaign to prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy
Valley with Yosemite National Park. In 1913, after years of
effort, the battle was lost and the valley that Muir likened to
Yosemite itself was doomed to become a reservoir to supply
the water needs of a growing San Francisco. The following
year, after a short illness, Muir died at his daughter's house in
Los Angeles.

North of San Francisco is a large stand of huge California
redwood trees, Muir Woods, preserved for all future
generations as a monument and tribute to John Muir. On the
occasion of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Muir's
birth, my wife and I brought with us to Scotland six small
Redwood trees directly from Muir Woods. We had the pleasure
of planting those trees near the John Muir Regional Park, which
has now been established along the Dunbar coastline.

John Muir was, I believe, the world's most influential
naturalist and conservationist. He taught the people of his
time and ours the importance of experiencing and protecting
our natural heritage. His words have heightened our perception
of nature. His personal and determined involvement in the
great conservation questions of the day was and remains an
inspiration for citizen involvement in the environmental
movement everywhere.

The times cry out for solutions to growing international
environmental problems. Our Third World neighbors need and
are asking for our help.

For example, Haitian forests began to disappear 25 years
ago. They were being cut beyond their capacity to regenerate.
Now, Haitians have cut more than 80 percent of the timber
from the hillsides, exposing fragile topsoil to tropical rains
which have washed it into the sea. Haitian poverty has become
the worst in the Western Hemisphere. Partially a result,
Haitian immigrants are flooding into our country.

Passage through the Panama Canal, important to world
and U.S. trade and vital to our national security, is severely
limited during their dry season because of the lack of depth
capacity in Lake Gatun. This low water level results from
excessive logging for firewood by growing numbers of landless
farmers on the hillsides surrounding the canal.

This year an area of tropical rain forest the size of the
State of Pennsylvania (27 million acres) will be destroyed --
3,000 acres per hour. This destruction likely will take place
next year and the years after that as well. If this pace is not
slowed, substantially all that rain forest will be lost early in
the next century.

Attendant to that loss, is a tragic loss of species
diversity. Tropical rain forests cover six percent of the
world's surface, yet provide a home to half of the world's
species. Twenty-five percent of those species will be extinct
by 2050 -- a species lost each day. One out of four
pharmaceuticals comes from tropical plants.

Loss of tropical rain forest, and the effects of burning
the residue, increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We
now are learning that this is an important component of the
"greenhouse" effect. Moreover, most of the Third World's
population relies on tropical rain forest for the necessities of
life.

I could cite similar sobering statistics about Acid Rain,
the loss of Ozone protection in the upper atmosphere, the
radiation damage that results from nuclear accidents such as
the one at Chernobyl in Russia, desertification of vast areas of
Africa and resulting hunger for its people. These
environmental threats and catastrophes do not respect
political boundaries. They are international in scope and
threaten the quality of life on this planet for ourselves and for
our future generations.

What hope is there that we, as individuals, can have any
impact upon such global problems? I submit to all of you that
an answer lies in following the path of the wise Scotsman,
upon whom we have focused this evening. He taught us much
about citizen activism and its power to move governments.

Yes, John Muir offers us a role model that challenges us
to respond, to speak out, to live our lives in an environmentally
sensitive fashion, and to demand a much heightened level of
concern by our government officials toward environmental
problems. I am proud to be a part of Mr. Muir's legacy. You,
also, should be very proud of your countryman, the boy from
Dunbar, and the indelible legacy of green that he has left upon
our planet.